The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Doing What We Like
"I DON'T care for my work; it doesn't suit me. If I could only find something I liked and was interested in, I think I might get on," a shiftless sophomore said to me a few days ago.
As he spoke I called to mind the figure of an old man I had seen the last time I passed through the country town where I spent my childhood. He was sitting on the station platform whittling and watching the train go through. He was bent, unshaven, unkempt,—the living picture of failure.
I saw him first when I was seven and he a strong young fellow of thirty. He was running the grain elevator then with good business prospects, but he didn't like it; it did not seem to suit him. He had talents. He sang in the church choir, he led the village band, he presided at public meetings. He gave up the elevator shortly and opened a grocery store. He tried farming and market gardening; he ran a news stand; he was postmaster, but he never put his best effort into any one of these activities, because he was not interested; he thought it was not what he was cut out for. He couldn't just get down to it.
He drifted from Presbyterianism to Christian Science; his political favorites ranged from St. John and Grover Cleveland to Theodore Roosevelt. He stuck to no principle or profession, he got nowhere because he could not find anything that really held his interest. Men with half his talent and one-fourth of his opportunity far outstripped him, and because he was never willing to do well the thing at hand, he found himself at seventy no further than the station platform. Through all the years he had been watching the train go by because he could never make up his mind where he wanted to go.
I see students like him every day. They have opportunity to get training, but they are not satisfied; they are looking for some more interesting, more suitable, less exacting work. They hold back or shift about with the hope that they will discover some intellectual occupation that will so thrill them that they will go to it with constant enthusiasm and without personal effort. They fail because they can't get what they like, not realizing that it is possible to learn to like almost anything and obligatory to do our work whether we like it or not.
The man who succeeds does more difficult, disagreeable, unpleasant, uninteresting things in a week than are crowded into a whole college course. He doesn't whine and look about for something soft—he goes to it.
July